Tag Archives: International Criminal Court

I love a man in uniform: Museveni (R) ogles Maj. Gen. David Hogg of US Army Africa Command (AFRICOM), at Kampala military summit, May 2012

I hope African human rights activists, including LGBTI activists, will read this document. It’s the White House’s new “strategy paper” for sub-Saharan Africa, released in June. There is the usual airy talk about democratization and feeding people, unballasted by details or dollars. (There is substantial attention to trade, which reaffirms my sense of the shape of aid conditionalities to come: the main quid-pro-quo for US assistance to Africa will be not decreased rights abuses, but increased trading opportunities for US firms.) But the core of the paper mentions no ballots and promises no butter. It’s about guns. “Security” is its watchword. Reuters noted, in its neutral fashion, that the paper lacks “a single signature project which could cement Obama’s Africa legacy”:

Instead, attention has focused on AFRICOM, the unified U.S. Africa Command that the Pentagon established in 2007. It is playing an increasingly important role as the United States pumps resources into training African militaries. …

J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa program at the Atlantic Council, said Washington’s emphasis on security, coupled with the lack of new economic initiatives, had shifted the balance in U.S. ties with Africa.

“It is militarization by default,” Pham said. “Part of the reason is the U.S. interest in fighting al Qaeda, and part of it is because of the weakness of our African partners which are unable to contain these threats themselves.”

A slight image problem: AFRICOM

One consultancy group of “Africa experts” speculates that “the timing of the paper is in response to the recent controversy generated by news stories reporting of the US’ ‘shadow war’ in sub-Saharan Africa.” Yup. Shortly before the strategy paper’s launch, the Washington Post revealed that the US has set up networks of secret bases across the continent, to use surveillance technology and Special Forces incursions against alleged terrorists and other undesirables. Special training for African militaries is part of the package. So, too, are murders:

O, left hand! O, right hand! Here, poor Third Worldies, have some food before I shoot you.

Why should LGBTI activists care? Well, Hillary Clinton is, with quite genuine élan, promoting the liberties of LGBTI folk on the continent. The right hand is on your side. But US military policy is propping up exactly the regimes — in Uganda, the DRC, Ethiopia, and elsewhere — that relish your oppression. The left hand doesn’t give a damn about you. For how can there possibly be any benign result to all this: secret US aid to train secret African military forces in secret strategies of murder and oppression? What can this conceivably achieve but to prop up dictatorships, and threaten even democratic governments with armed coups and dictatorial control?

Right hand, ignore that pesky left hand: US Gen. Carter Ham of AFRICOM describes actions against Joseph Kony

Just for one example:The BBC World Service just carried a fascinating report on the militarization of Ugandan politics, as the country becomes more and more a security adjunct to US ambitions in the region. See, or rather hear, here. (You have to sign up to listen.)

A reader has also pointed out Phil Clark’s op-ed from this spring, fingering the dreadful Kony 2012 campaign as part of a broader project to build up Museveni’s repressive military by any excuses necessary. It capitalizes on wide support “for two of the international community’s preferred means of ending mass conflict — military intervention and international justice.” And the enthusiasm has come not just from trigger-happy Western governments but from naive human rights organizations. They deliberately overlook

the fact that, in pursuing rebel leaders in central Africa, the United States and the I.C.C. have cooperated with the Ugandan and Congolese governments, which themselves are responsible for murder, forced displacement, rape and torture of civilians over the last 15 years. …

When President Obama sent 100 American military advisers to support the Ugandan government’s campaign against the Lord’s Resistance Army last October, it was the latest move in a long-standing military relationship. Since the 1990s, Washington has viewed Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s government as a key regional ally against the Sudanese government during Khartoum’s wars in South Sudan and Darfur, the “terrorist” threat of the L.R.A., and most recently Al Shabab in Somalia. Washington’s political, military and economic aid to Uganda has propped up Museveni’s regime and strengthened the role of the armed forces in everyday politics. One reason that widespread protests in Uganda in early 2011 did not transform into another Tahrir Square was that the Ugandan armed forces — nourished for years on Museveni’s corrupt patronage, funded mainly by the United States — remained fiercely loyal to the president, including when asked to fire on innocent civilians.

It’s not just Obama. As Clark emphasizes, the International Criminal Court, beloved of those who think human rights aren’t real unless they have police and prosecutors attached like sinister Siamese siblings, has been equally complicit in whitewashing Museveni. The Court, he writes,

has relied on Museveni and the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, for the referral of their conflicts to the court, the security of its investigators, and assistance in identifying and transporting witnesses and gathering evidence. In January 2004, the I.C.C. prosecutor appeared side-by-side with Museveni in London to announce the opening of international court investigations in Uganda. Two weeks ago, Ocampo announced that he would soon visit Kinshasa to meet President Kabila and “thank him for his support” during the Lubanga investigations. From the outset, the close working relationship between the I.C.C. and the Ugandan and Congolese governments has allowed the latter to focus the court’s attention on atrocities committed by rebel leaders while insulating themselves from prosecution.

Museveni and Kabila have proven masterful at making themselves indispensable to international actors. Unquestioning international cooperation with the Ugandan and Congolese governments has allowed them to appear as agents of peace, security and justice while continuing to commit abuses against their citizens. That the United States and the I.C.C. voiced no concern while Museveni and Kabila cracked down on the political opposition during last year’s elections has emboldened them. The claim by the I.C.C. and its supporters that the court deters criminal behavior and therefore contributes to lasting peace rings hollow when state crimes are committed under its watchful eye.

Promoting his armed approached to governance and freedoms as a model for other regional leaders, Museveni this year hosted a conference of military brass from across the continent. Talk about resisting aid conditionality! When it comes to pernicious plots against sovereignty, it seems, the homosexuals are a minor annoyance next to perverted foreign pacifists. He blasted belt-tightening demands from donors that might shrink military spending:

“Africa armies must be ideologically independent from foreign exploitation and manipulation. Some external forces told us not to spend 1.9 per cent of our budget and we had to reduce the size the army,” Mr Museveni said.

Spheres of affluence: US military commands

A final point. I mentioned AFRICOM, the US military’s Africa command, above. At present, this relatively novel US unit is based in Germany, from where it played a leading role in the Libya intervention. That success (from the American standpoint) gave it a great deal of street cred, or rather sky cred, with DC policymakers. The Bush administration set up AFRICOM in large part as a military counterweight to growing Chinese involvement, and investment, in Africa. From this perspective, the secretive “counterterrorism” campaigns it dallies with conceal, like the proverbial Chinese boxes, yet another secret: they mask a larger geopolitical ambition. They’re more about Beijing’s honchos than Bin Laden’s heirs: AFRICOM aims to keep China away from that vast wealth of African raw materials that we’ve already succeeding in keeping Africans away from. (One fascinating thing about Africa is that all its riches, without exceptions, make the bulk of Africans poorer. This is a cultural phenomenon worth Mitt Romney’s study, though it has more to do with Western culture than its African counterpart.)

Several of Museveni’s supporters in the US Congress — including the head of the House’s subcommittee on terrorism, Republican Ed Royce — are exploiting the Kony 2012 mania to push for laws expanding AFRICOM’s role in Africa. Some want to move the command’s headquarters from Europe to the continent itself. All this would vastly increase the support it can provide to Museveni and fellow dictators.

Africans and their allies have mobilized against AFRICOM’s present and predicted roles in repression. You can visit the Resist AFRICOM site here:

With the establishment of AFRICOM, the Pentagon attempts to increase access to Africa’s oil and to wage a new front in the Global War on Terror without regard for the needs or desires of African people. Enabled by oil companies and private military contractors, AFRICOM serves as the latest frontier in military expansionism, violating the human rights and civil liberties of Africans who have voiced a strong “no” to U.S. military presence. We reject this militarization of foreign engagement. Instead, our vision is a comprehensive U.S. foreign policy grounded in true partnership with the African Union, African governments, and civil society on peace, justice, security, and development.